Do You Think Your Vote Will Count?

(Even the birds got a kick out of that one, Bill)

blue.
trying to decide if that makes us sad or obscene, or both...

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Hey Squinney! Glad you got to ask the great big cushy SOFTBALL question of the day! Is this part of the urban disruption of today's Convention?

Pay?

<searching memory>

I believe you owe me some $$, Bill.

Or a NON-stinky actual cheesehead, if such an object can be found. (Mine reeked.) (Until I returned it, that is. I don't know whether it was just that store that had stanky cheeseheads or if they all are.)

More news on Florida voting... You Floridians really have to fight to be counted! Well, the Florida Dem's do, anyway.

http://www.misleader.org/daily_mislead/Read.asp?fn=df09022004.html

California to sue Diiebold over false claims...

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20040907/tc_nm/tech_diebold_dc_1

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - California Attorney General Bill Lockyer said on Tuesday he would sue electronic voting machine maker Diebold Inc. (NYSE:DBD - news) on charges it defrauded the state with false claims about its products...

As a conservative Republican in the Northeast, I'm used to my vote "not counting", though usually not because of anyone's cheating.

But when things are close --as they may be here in PA this year-- I get a little nervous.

Philadelphia is hardly the bastion of clean-voting! In 2000 many precincts had 100% turnout! with 99% of the vote going to Gore! If the tallies had been at all close in the state, you can bet PA would have gotten the attention Florida did (and on much better grounds!)

So, if it comes down to the wire and Philly manages to manufacture the same sort of totals as in 2000. . . then it is quite possible my vote truly will not be properly counted.

(Note, I am not saying "Dems are a bunch of cheaters". I do think, however, that whenever one party essentially controls a city for decades the tempation and OPPORTUNITY for cheating and maintaining control by corrupt means become very great. Since the GOP strongholds are loosely spread across the state and the DEM areas are concentrated--mainly in Philly and Pittsburth-- there is a greater chance for a corrupt group of Dems in Philly to affect the totals.)

I used a touch screen in CA to vote against the recall and to vote for Cruz Bustamante. Nobody I know voted for Arnold.

It is true that Northern CA was not swayed to Arnold, but I'm more than slightly dubious of the numbers of votes attributed to Arnold up here. I would have guessed he'd have fewer.

I think if an election was proven to be rigged you might see riots to make Rodney King seem like a matter of minor offense.

ahnold got big props down behind the orange curtain. i think that sacremento was very pro recall/ ahnold.

i voted simply no recall.

What a bunch of girly men.

why yes, you are right...

it is really quite girly to come back months and months after a verified election has taken place and complain.

and don't start with the florida stuff. there's more than enough suspicion to go around down there from day 1.

It's hardly that when Davis lied and hid information about the state of the state. He deserved the recall. Simon wasn't the best candidate but would have won easily if those numbers were made public.

Oh, and about Florida, I'm assuming you're talking about the fact that several major networks called the state before voting booths closed in the panhandle. I'm glad you brought that up, everyone always forgets that.

Eyes on Florida
Jeb Bush's state is at the center of the political storm again as election officials battle over putting Nader on the ballot.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Julian Borger

Sept. 15, 2004 | Florida and Jeb Bush, the president's brother, were once more at the center of a legal row over the presidential election yesterday, after Gov. Bush's administration intervened to ensure Ralph Nader was on the state ballot. Florida Democrats, fearing Nader will take votes away from them, accused the state government of flouting a court order Sept. 8 that removed the third-party candidate and veteran consumer activist from the ballot, on the grounds that the group sponsoring him, the Reform Party, was not a nationally recognized party.

Nader's lawyers challenged the verdict, but his name remained off the state ballot pending the appeal. However, Gov. Bush's secretary of state, Glenda Hood, has stepped in and submitted her own appeal -- which automatically suspended the court order, putting Nader back in the running just in time for absentee ballots to be mailed to 50,000 U.S. soldiers and other overseas voters by a Saturday deadline.


"This is blatant political maneuvering by Jeb Bush to give his brother a leg up on Election Day," the Florida Democratic Party's chairman, Scott Maddox, said. "And it's just plain wrong." Once Nader's name was on absentee ballots, the state government would use the fact to strengthen the case to include it on ballots across Florida on Election Day, Maddox claimed.

Democrats also pointed out that Nader's campaign had hired a Republican lawyer, Kenneth Sukhia, who worked for Bush in the dramatic 2000 election recount, as proof that the Bush White House was conniving in Nader's efforts to get on to the ballot.

Democratic outrage was fueled when Hood's office blamed Hurricane Ivan, which is bearing down on the Gulf of Mexico coast, for its unusual intervention on behalf of a third-party candidate.

A hearing on the case had been scheduled for Thursday, but the state elections director, Dawn Roberts, said that Ivan might make that hearing impossible, and potentially deny Nader's right to be on the ballot. "There remains a substantial question as to when such a hearing on the permanent injunction will be held, considering the track of Hurricane Ivan," Roberts said in a memorandum to county election supervisors who had just ordered new ballots printed without Nader's name.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans were being evacuated Tuesday from a swath of the Gulf Coast from Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle in the west of the state, in anticipation of the hurricane as it moved northwest out of the Caribbean.

Hood denied that the state government was taking sides, saying it was simply intervening to ensure that nobody's democratic rights were infringed. "We are acting as an honest broker," the Florida secretary of state said.

Gov. Bush's administration was the focus of complaints in 2000, when thousands of black Floridians were removed from electoral lists because they were wrongly classified as former felons without voting rights.

Hood's predecessor, Katherine Harris, was also attacked by Democrats at the time for summarily rejecting their appeals against the first vote count, and certifying the initial results that gave the state, and the presidency, to George W. Bush. After five weeks of legal wrangling, the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in and awarded the election, by a one-vote majority, to Bush.

This year, the state is being carefully scrutinized for its conduct of the election, and was recently forced to abandon the use of another felons list that was found to be faulty. Democrats and civil rights activists have pointed toward the use this year of computer voting as a possible new source of errors and fraud.

Nader won 97,000 votes in Florida four years ago as the Green Party candidate, when Bush was declared to have clinched the election by a margin of only 537 votes over Al Gore. However, some polls this year have suggested he would draw no more votes away from John Kerry than from President Bush.

How would you feel if you were a Nader supporter living in Florida? (other than all wet)

I would think that the Green Party, rather than the Reform Party, should have sponsored him in the first place. They can't twist the law.

uh, in this eletion, that's the only thing they have going on. they're "all wet" ?

Update


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/07/opinion/07thu2.html?th

hen members of Mi Familia Vota, a Latino group, were registering voters recently on a Miami Beach sidewalk outside a building where new citizens were being sworn in, the Homeland Security Department ordered them to stop. The department gave all kinds of suspect reasons, which a federal court has since rejected, but it looked a lot as if someone at Homeland Security just didn't want thousands of new Latino voters on the Florida rolls.

The suppression of minority votes is alive and well in 2004, driven by the sharp partisan divide across the nation. Because many minority groups vote heavily Democratic, some Republicans view keeping them from registering and voting as a tactic for victory - one that has a long history in American politics. It is rarely talked about publicly, but John Pappageorge, a Republican state legislator from Michigan, recently broke the taboo. He was quoted in The Detroit Free Press as saying, "If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election cycle." Detroit's population is more than 80 percent black.

A recent report by the N.A.A.C.P. and People for the American Way includes page after page of examples of how this shabby business works. On Election Day, "ballot security" teams head for minority neighborhoods. They demand that voters produce identification when it is not required, take photographs of voters and single out immigrant voters for special scare tactics.

Two years ago in the governor's race in Maryland, leaflets appeared in Baltimore saying that before voters showed up at the polls, they had to pay off all parking tickets and overdue rent. The same year in Louisiana, fliers were distributed in African-American areas to tell voters, falsely, that if they did not want to vote on Election Day, they could still vote three days later.

What is particularly discouraging this year is the degree to which government officials have been involved in such efforts. In South Dakota's hard-fought statewide Congressional race, poll workers turned away Native American voters who could not provide photo identification, which many of them do not have, even though the law clearly says identification is not required. In one heavily Native American county, the top elections official, who is white, wrote out instructions saying no one could vote without photo identification. In Texas, a white district attorney threatened to prosecute students at Prairie View A&M, a large, predominantly African-American campus, if they registered to vote from the school, even though they are entitled to by law.

And in Florida, the secretary of state, Glenda Hood, had ....

http://www.klas-tv.com/Global/story.asp?S=2421595&nav=168XRvNe


Voter Registrations Possibly Trashed



(Oct. 12) -- Employees of a private voter registration company allege that hundreds, perhaps thousands of voters who may think they are registered will be rudely surprised on election day. The company claims hundreds of registration forms were thrown in the trash.

Anyone who has recently registered or re-registered to vote outside a mall or grocery store or even government building may be affected.

The I-Team has obtained information about an alleged widespread pattern of potential registration fraud aimed at democrats. Thee focus of the story is a private registration company called Voters Outreach of America, AKA America Votes.

The out-of-state firm has been in Las Vegas for the past few months, registering voters. It employed up to 300 part-time workers and collected hundreds of registrations per day, but former employees of the company say that Voters Outreach of America only wanted Republican registrations.

Two former workers say they personally witnessed company supervisors rip up and trash registration forms signed by Democrats.

"We caught her taking Democrats out of my pile, handed them to her assistant and he ripped them up right in front of us. I grabbed some of them out of the garbage and she tells her assisatnt to get those from me," said Eric Russell, former Voters Outreach employee.

Eric Russell managed to retrieve a pile of shredded paperwork including signed voter registration forms, all from Democrats. We took them to the Clark County Election Department and confirmed that they had not, in fact, been filed with the county as required by law.

So the people on those forms who think they will be able to vote on Election Day are sadly mistaken. We attempted to speak to Voters Outreach but found that its office has been rented out to someone else.

The landlord says Voters Outreach was evicted for non-payment of rent. Another source said the company has now moved on to Oregon where it is once again registering voters. It's unknown how many registrations may have been tossed out, but another ex-employee told Eyewitness News she had the same suspicions when she worked there.

It's going to take a while to sort all of this out, but the immediate concern for voters is to make sure you really are registered.